Nothing Sweet Nor Fitting

The problems of violence, militarism and oppressive religious practices are still with us. What examples are you aware of in today’s world? In what ways do you see God still working to overthrow these?

The most disturbing example of current day oppressive religious practice that comes to mind for me, is what I see and read (particularly on the Internet) from the “religious right” in the most conservative branches of the traditionalist Roman Catholic Church in the USA: voices decrying the progress of Vatican II and harking back to former “glory days” in the Church’s history, where the Church’s authority was absolute, the people were expected to blindly obey, and women were very definitely second class citizens. This is also the Church where success was measured by the number of ordained clergy, and consecrated people in religious life: all wearing their full habits and ecclesial regalia, heading up in-your-face street processions to proclaim the Triumph of the Cross and the supremacy of Rome.

It’s a real worry when good people want to “show everyone” that their faith (and their particular brand of devotional practice) is “the right way” and that everybody else is “wrong” regardless of their spirituality or experience of God. In this paradigm, a person’s “spirituality” can be measured by the externals of their practice: how frequently they attend Mass and receive the sacraments, what they wear, who they sit next to, whose ideologies they support in discussions on matters of “the Faith”.

I see God still working to overthrow this by quietly but consistently planting seeds of reasonable sensibility in the minds and hearts of sound Catholic theologians who work tirelessly to bring people to a better understanding of God as our loving, merciful, forgiving Father who looks into people’s hearts rather than judges by externals, and who wants good things for ALL people.